STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

NASA Upgrades Giant Rocket-Carrying Vehicle

For five decades a 6.3-million pound behemoth of a machine, like a baseball diamond perched atop tank treads, has moved NASA rockets from their hangars to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Now the two Crawler-Transporters, stalwart workhorses of the American space program, is getting its first major upgrade.

Maxing out at just a mile an hour, the crawlers hauled the iconic Saturn V used in the Apollo missions on the eight-hour trip from the vehicle assembly building. They carried Skylab, the first US space station. They moved every space shuttle on all 135 missions. Not bad for a machine that debuted the year after the Ford Mustang. “How many Mustangs do you see on the road today,” says John Giles, the deputy project manager for the crawlers. “They’ve all gone by the wayside.” But his crawler-transporters are still at work.

At least they will be—after some tinkering. They’ll get new, stronger steel, and new roller bearings, brakes, and gearboxes. NASA engineers will replace the hydraulic system that lifts and lowers the platform when the rockets get loaded on. By the time the work is done at the end of the year, the agency will have put $50 million into the machines.

But if the space program goes as planned, it’ll be worth it. NASA hopes to use its new Space Launch System to rocket crewed Orion spacecraft to space, maybe even to Mars. And the SLS is the most powerful rocket ever built. To carry it, the souped-up crawler will have to be able to handle 18 million pounds, 6 million more than before. And eventually other rocket launch groups, like United Launch Alliance, might also use the crawler system. “It’s not like what it used to be in the past,” says Mary Hanna, the crawler-transport system’s project manager. “We’re posturing to be a multiuse spaceport.”

One thing that probably won’t change much is the ride itself. It’s slow enough that at first it barely looks like it’s moving. But once it starts down the roadway—paved with rocks to withstand the weight—the crawler with a rocket on top still looks like an engineering marvel.

The crawler under construction in 1964

A view of Crawler 1 in 1964

Delivering the Saturn V rocket with Apollo 10 to the launch pad in 1969

President Jimmy Carter learns about the crawler during a tour of Kennedy Space Center in 1978

Space Shuttle Discovery prepares for the second servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997

Space Shuttle Endeavour gets ready for launch on STS-67, which at the time was the longest shuttle mission to date at 16 days

Space Shuttle Atlantis before the last shuttle flight in 2011

The upgraded Crawler 2 goes on a test drive

The upgraded Crawler 2 leaves the vehicle assembly building

[MIKA27]

Inside Gaza's tunnels, militants get ready for the next war

In an olive grove close to houses in the southern Gaza Strip, the earth slides open smoothly, revealing a sight to terrify Israel.

A deep pit containing a 120mm (4in) mortar tube, and three fighters from the militant group - Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Fully armed and in combat fatigues, the men are all wearing head torches. They move quickly, in well-drilled movements, loading and unloading the tube from a stack of mortars at the back of their position.

This is a show of readiness, a show of strength, for the next war with Israel. It is a war that both the militants and the Israeli military, on the other side of the border, believe could come again soon.

The hidden mortar pit is right by the border with Israel, or so I am told.

I cannot be entirely sure as the armed fighters blindfolded me, searched me for tracking devices and removed my mobile phones before the journey.

Viewed as a terrorist group in the West, Islamic Jihad is committed to Israel's destruction.

At the back of the firing position is a small curtain that leads into a tunnel cut through the earth. It turns a corner and enters a larger, even deeper tunnel, perhaps 20m down.

Its reinforced concrete walls have an arched roof, tall enough for the men of Islamic Jihad to stand up, and run through it.

This is their escape route, running for hundreds of metres, its exit - or exits - unknown.

The well-constructed walls glisten as condensation reflects off the lights, powered by a car battery, that runs along the length of the tunnel. Deep underground, the air in the tunnel is cool.

Standing inside, his face hidden, is a fighter, with the nom de guerre, Abu Hamza.

"In the last war we noticed that every moving thing on the surface of the earth was bombed, whether it was ambulances, civilians or fighters walking on the street," he said.

"So [the tunnels] are our hiding place, away from the eyes of the Zionist enemy… we used them to launch [mortars and anti-tank] missiles".

Palestinian militants can move fast inside the tunnels

The tunnel was used in the last war, and it will be used in the next, he said.

As tensions - including attacks - continue between Hamas, who govern Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad wants to make its presence felt.

The 50-day conflict in Gaza left at least 2,189 Palestinians dead, including more than 1,486 civilians, according to the UN, and 11,000 injured. On the Israeli side, 67 soldiers and six civilians were killed, with scores more wounded.

Large parts of neighbourhoods in Gaza are in ruins, and the Strip is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis which has left many thousands of families homeless.

Six months on, the rubble from the war lies mostly uncleared and there has been little rebuilding.

Israeli worries

In Israel, communities along the border are well drilled at responding to the rocket and mortar attacks. But they fear even more the tunnels that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad built under the border fence.

Last year's war was a battle between Israeli artillery and aircraft and militant mortars and rockets from Gaza

Some 32 tunnels were discovered crossing the border and there are believed to be hundreds more inside Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to eradicate the border tunnels but it seems that the threat, though reduced, still remains.

The war in Gaza took place in the skies - a battle between Israeli artillery and aircraft and militant mortars and rockets from Gaza.

But it was also an underground war. Israel was caught unprepared as the militants used tunnel warfare to an extent never seen before.

According to Col Dado, a commander of southern Gaza for the Israel Defense Forces, "the main goal of the tunnels is not to make peace - it is to go and attack civilians and to capture or kidnap soldiers.

"We are worried about it and trying to invent solutions to this problem."

He would not give details on how Israel is doing so. It is thought to be using enhanced scanning equipment to identify tunnel sites, which it then destroys.

'We stood our ground'

On Gaza's southern border, another battle is raging. Near daily explosions can be seen and heard as Egyptian forces extend a buffer zone with Gaza to a kilometre wide.

Egypt's soldiers move around in armoured vehicles. Border controls have been tightened and they are using explosives to destroy homes and smuggling tunnels that have been a lifeline to Gaza.

Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi blames Hamas and others for aiding attacks in the Sinai.

Gaza is being cornered, more isolated than ever before. In Gaza City, demonstrators recently took to the streets to protest against Egyptian policies.

Publicly at least, Islamic Jihad refuses to acknowledge Egypt's role as hostile.

Abu Abdullah, another fighter, said, "we believe that Egypt's role in the conflict is as a… booster of the Palestinian cause".

But when I ask another militant when he thinks the next war will come, he jokes: "With Israel or with Egypt?"

And another war with Israel is inevitable, say the militants of Islamic Jihad. They say they lost 145 fighters during the last conflict. Many more civilians were killed. So what was achieved?

"Our biggest achievement is that we stood our ground, and we challenged the occupier," said Abu Ibrahim, a commander of their Saraya al-Quds brigade.

"Unlike the whole world, we are still able to say 'no' to them, 'no' to the occupation. We are still able to resist."

Islamic Jihad fighters have been training hard in recent days

Along the border with Israel, it remains relatively quiet. The six-month ceasefire is holding.

But Col Dado, like the men of Islamic Jihad on the other side of the fence, is pessimistic.

"We can see their side is [rebuilding] the tunnels and [preparing themselves] for the next fight," he said.

"We are doing the same. I hope it will be a long time from today, but I'm not pretty sure about it.

"So - sooner rather than later?" I ask.

"Unfortunately," the colonel responds.

[MIKA27]

Russia: Rehab plan for alcoholic bears

Two alcoholic Russian bears who were kept in appalling conditions for more than 20 years could soon be enjoying a new life in Romania.

In February, a court ruled that the male bears must be confiscated from their owner, who kept them in a small, rubbish-strewn cage at a restaurant in the Black Sea city of Sochi. The animals - one of which is blind - became addicted to alcohol after visitors continually gave them drinks, the Tass news agency reports. While the removal order comes into effect in March, they're currently still living with the owner, and need travel paperwork to be issued by the Sochi authorities. "The court order is there to take them away but there is nowhere to put them in Sochi," says Anna Kogan, head of the Big Hearts Foundation, which is coordinating the move with support from other animal charities. A bear sanctuary in Romania has now offered to re-home the bears and provide them with treatment for their alcohol problems.

"It's a very expensive process to move them abroad," Ms Kogan tells the BBC, adding that the foundation is still looking for logistical help to transport the bears by boat across the Black Sea. But if they make it to their new home, their chances of recovery are good. "The people there have worked with dancing bears who had similar problems... it can be done," Ms Kogan says. The restaurant owner previously defended keeping the bears, arguing that beer was good for them because of the climate.

The adult bears are being kept together in a small cage

[MIKA27]

Mysterious Rain of Money Falls From the Sky in Kuwait City

Metaphorically speaking, money has been falling from nowhere in Kuwait ever since oil was discovered in the Middle East. However, a large amount of paper money fell from the sky over Kuwait City for real recently and so far, no one has come forth with an explanation or to claim it.

The rain of cash occurred on the afternoon of February 11. Before the shower of buying power was over, an estimated 2 to 3 million AED (United Arab Emirates dirham) worth between $544,000 and $817,000 (US dollars) fell, mostly in 500 AED notes worth about $136 each. Witnesses say the rain of cash fell for a few minutes, stopping traffic as people ran to pick up the bills.

Traffic stopped as the mysterious money showered down

Initial reports had the money raining down in Dubai but the video shows the Burj Jassem shopping mall in Kuwait City. The confusion may have been caused by the currency, since the AED is the currency in Dubai while the Kuwaiti dinar (KWD) is used in Kuwait. Whatever the floating currency was, no explanation has been given for the money shower or how it was counted and no person, bank or rich prince has claimed it.

While most money showers can be explained by open bank windows on windy days, unattended rich babies or generous philanthropists in planes, Forteans know that mysterious and unexplained rains of cash have occurred before. In 1968, bursts of pennies fell over a 15 minute period in Newington Road, Ramsgate, Kent – pennies that were mysteriously bent before they fell. In 1957, thousands of 1000 franc notes fell onto Bourges, France, and in 1975 hundreds of one dollar bills totaling $588 rained on Chicago, Illinois. Over $7000 once fell on McClellan Highway in East Boston, Massachusetts and in July 2007 a highway in Worms, Germany was covered with what was described by the police as a “substantial amount of money.”

What caused the cash to fall in Kuwait City? And why didn’t it fall where you live instead? The mystery continues.

[MIKA27]

WHISKEY NOTES: TASTING AND DISTILLING LOGBOOK

Whiskey’s popularity continues to rise, and with so many new variations of the multi-faceted spirit being released, you need a good way to keep track of everything you’re trying. The Kings County Distillery has come to the rescue with Whiskey Notes: Tasting and Distilling Logbook.

Colin Spoelman and David Haskell teamed up to start the first New York City distillery since Prohibition (The Kings County Distillery), and decided to also create the perfect logbook for fellow whiskey lovers. This set of journals includes one with guided pages for tasting notes, a slim notebook with work sheets for the home distiller, and even a fold out poster of the entire American Whiskey Family Tree. The perfect gift for any whiskey fan, you can scoop this thing up on Amazon. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

2016 AUDI R8 V10

Audi gave us a taste of what’s to come at this year’s Geneva Motor Show as they pulled the curtain back on the 2016 Audi R8 V10.

Every year we wonder how cars like the R8 will be improved upon the subsequent year, and every year auto makers like Audi deliver. 2016 will bring to the streets Audi’s most powerful and fastest production vehicle ever. Powered by a 5.2-liter mid-engine V10 engine, this R8 makes 610 ponies, reaching 60 miles per hour from a dead stop in 3.2 seconds, and a top speed of 205 mph. Power is delivered through a shift-by-wire seven-speed S tronic paddle-shift gearbox, and Audi has kept in place the Quattro all-wheel drive system we love so dearly. The brand also managed to shed some weight on the coupe (110 pounds), with the new model now weighing in at 3,205 pounds. The inside is everything you’d expect from a luxury car – near perfection.

[MIKA27]

NEVER RUN OUT OF POWER AGAIN WITH THIS JUMP CHARGING CABLE AND BACKUP BATTERY

We depend on our iPhones and Androids for everything, and nothing paralyzes us like running out of power. Native Union's Jump Charging Cable is here to fix that with brilliant design and cutting-edge innovation in an everyday charging cable with a built-in intelligent back-up battery. The technology redirects power to charge its own battery when your smartphone is fully charged so its always ready to go when you are. It also keeps you tidy with a cable management system and supports high speed data transfers. [PURCHASE]

[MIKA27]

ASTRONAUT ICE CREAM

Even though it was only served on the Apollo missions, we just can't get enough of Astronaut Ice Cream.

It's a 15-pack of Neapolitan freeze dried ice cream that is frozen to -40 degrees and vacuum dried in a foil pouch. And if it can stand up to the conditions in space, you know it'll stay intact during your next outdoor adventure.

[MIKA27]

A Brief History of Endeavour: NASA's Space Shuttle Built from Spares

Fifteen years ago today NASA launched the space shuttle Endeavour on a mission to take the highly detailed images of the Earth’s surface. It was the company’s final, and most advanced space shuttle.

To celebrate the lifetime of Endeavour, here are some interesting facts about this amazing spacecraft. From being given its name by kids, to a Commander’s emotional sign-off on its final voyage.

Making a Name for Itself

Its official designation is OV-105 (orbiter vehicle), but was also named after HMS Endeavour, the British ship that Captain James Cook used on his first voyage of discovery in 1768. The name was chosen in a national competition involving students from elementary and secondary schools. The children were asked to select a named based on an exploratory sea vessel and almost a third of entries nominated Endeavour.

It’s also the reason Endeavour is spelt using the English spelling, and not the incorrect American ‘Endeavor’. This has caused some confusion in the past, including when the very intelligent people at NASA painted ‘Go Endeavor’ on the shuttle’s launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center. When someone phoned in to point out the mistake, the sign was quickly changed.

Time to Spare

The United States Congress authorised construction of Endeavour in 1987, and it was the final of five shuttles to be built. The programme was designed to replace Challenger, the space shuttle that broke apart 73 seconds after take-off on its tenth mission.

NASA had ordered structural spares during the construction of Discovery and Atlantis, so these parts were used to build Endeavour. This method of construction was chosen above refitting Enterprise, or building an entirely new vessel, as it was the cheaper alternative.

The shuttle was the first to gain a drag chute, which reduced its rollout distance from 2,000 metres to 1,000 metres. Other upgrades included improved plumbing and electrical systems, which increased the maximum possible mission time to 28 days; and a ‘glass cockpit’, which was a multi-functional, electronic display that was a great advancement on old CRT screens that were previously used.

Construction was completed on the 6th of July 1990, and was delivered the the Kennedy Space Center in May 1991.

Mission Statement

Endeavour certainly left it’s mark on history, with a number of important tasks and record breaking missions. It’s first mission was to complete an operation started by Challenger, to capture and repair INTELSAT VI.

This satellite required a replacement rocket motor, but Endeavour was not equipped with the correct tools to retrieve a satellite. This resulted in a groundbreaking spacewalk in which three people captured the satellite by hand. Once the new motor was attached it allowed the INTELSAT VI to enter a correct orbit and provided a relay link for the equivalent of 120,000 simultaneous phone calls and three television channels.

Between rescue attempts the shuttle crew also conducted medical tests which assessed the human body’s performance in microgravity, and recorded footage for an educational video.

Endeavour’s first mission was the first time four spacewalks were conducted on a single flight, and one of them was the second-longest in space history, with two astronauts spending eight hours and seven minutes in space (take that Sandra Bullock).

On the 11th of February 2000, Endeavour began a mission to take a ‘snapshot of our planet’. The 11-day operation would produce the most complete 3D map of the Earth’s surface, which was 30x more detailed than previous images. The best quality images were classified for use by the US Military and intelligence agencies, but lower resolutions maps were released to the public.

Endeavour was also used in a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. After the $2.5bn (£1.65bn) project was launched, NASA realised something was wrong when the images sent back were blurred and out of focus. Seven astronauts undertook a seven day mission to fix the telescope’s main mirror.

The space shuttle also hosted the first married couple on a single mission, Mark Lee and Jan Davis. The couple were placed on different teams and worked different shift patterns (presumably to avoid typical marital spats).

Final Flight

Endeavour’s final flight was on the 16th of May 2011. It was the vessel’s 25th overall mission, having already clocked 166 million km in space. This is larger than the distance between the Sun and the Earth.

Before the countdown began, Commander Mark Kelly said in a radio call to launch controllers: “This mission represents the power of teamwork, commitment and exploration. It is in the DNA of our great country to reach for the stars and explore. We must not stop.”

Endeavour is now on display at the California Science Centre.

[MIKA27]

This Impressive Marine Corps Light Show Is Almost As Good As Any Frame From The Movie Tron

This impressive Marine Corps light show is almost as good as any frame from the movie Tron. What you see is actually an AV-8B Harrier preparing to take off aboard the USS Essex (LHD 2) Wasp-class amphibious assault ship during training off the coast of San Diego, on February 24.

[MIKA27]

Monster 127kg Catfish Caught In Italy

Italian sport fishermen Dino Ferrari and his brother Dario lured in this monstrous 127kg and 2.67m catfish on February 19 in the Po Delta, in Italy. After taking this pictures and weighting the fish they released it back into the river.

The brothers used a fishing rod and had to fight for 40 minutes to reel it in.

Dino told The Telegraph:

“The American catfish doesn’t grow to such large dimensions — at most it can weigh 50kg.” He estimated the fish to be about 30 years old, based on its size, adding that the species can live for up to 50 years.

But this is not the first time Dino catches a enormous catfish in that same river. This video from 2013 shows him fishing a slightly smaller specimen — or maybe the same one but two years younger.

[MIKA27]

THE PLOT TO FREE NORTH KOREA WITH RERUNS OF ‘FRIENDS’

ON A CLOUDY, moonless night somewhere in northeastern China, three men creep through a stand of Japanese Clethra trees. They carry no flashlights, and the sky is so dark that they hear the sound of the rushing Tumen River before they see it: They’ve arrived at the North Korean border.

Earlier in the evening at a nearby restaurant, they treated the local Chinese police chief and head of the border patrol to a blowout feast of more than 20 dishes, climaxing with a southern China delicacy—a carp deep-fried and served alive, its mouth and gills still moving. Following an after-meal session of pricey Chunghwa cigarettes and shots of Moutai liquor, the officials made phone calls telling subordinates to abandon their posts for several hours. After dozens of these bribe dinners, they had become routine, practically a tradition among friends; by now the smugglers even had their own key to the rusty bike lock securing the border area’s barbed wire fence.

Two hours later the trio’s leader, a middle-aged North Korean defector named Jung Kwang-il, steps into the tall weeds of the riverbank. He pulls out a cheap laser pointer and flashes it across the water. Then he waits for a response: If he sees an X slashed through the air by a laser on the opposite bank, the operation will be called off. Instead, he’s answered with a red circle painted through the darkness.

Soon after, a compact man dressed in only a hoodie and boxer shorts wades out of the waist-high water and onto the riverbank where Jung and his companions stand. Jung arranged the meeting earlier in the day using coded language over walkie-talkies. The men embrace and speak softly for a minute about each other’s health, the price of North Korean mushrooms, and Jung’s mother, whom he’d left behind in the North 10 years ago. Then Jung hands the man a tightly wrapped plastic bag containing a trove of precious black-market data: 200 Sandisk USB drives and 300 micro SD cards, each packed with 16 gigabytes of videos like Lucy, Son of God, 22 Jump Street, and entire seasons of South Korean reality television shows, comedies, and soap operas. To bribe the guards on the North Korean side, Jung has included in the bag an HP laptop computer, cigarettes, liquor, and close to $1,000 in cash.

The man in the hoodie slings the bag of digital contraband over his shoulder. Then he says good-bye and disappears back into the world’s deepest black hole of information.

THAT SMUGGLING MISSION was planned and executed last September by the North Korea Strategy Center and its 46-year-old founder, Kang Chol-hwan. Over the past few years, Kang’s organization has become the largest in a movement of political groups who routinely smuggle data into North Korea. NKSC alone annually injects around 3,000 USB drives filled with foreign movies, music, and ebooks. Kang’s goal, as wildly optimistic as it may sound, is nothing less than the overthrow of the North Korean government. He believes that the Kim dynasty’s three-generation stranglehold on the North Korean people—and its draconian restriction on almost any information about the world beyond its borders—will ultimately be broken not by drone strikes or caravans of Humvees but by a gradual, guerrilla invasion of thumb drives filled with bootleg episodes of Friends and Judd Apatow comedies.

Kang likens the USB sticks to the red pill from The Matrix: a mind-altering treatment that has the power to shatter a world of illusions. “When North Koreans watch Desperate Housewives, they see that Americans aren’t all war-loving imperialists,” Kang says. “They’re just people having affairs or whatever. They see the leisure, the freedom. They realize that this isn’t the enemy; it’s what they want for themselves. It cancels out everything they’ve been told. And when that happens, it starts a revolution in their mind.”

I first meet Kang in a conference room of his office on the ninth floor of a Seoul high-rise. Outside, a bored plainclothes policeman keeps watch, part of a 24/7 security detail provided by the South Korean government after Kang appeared on a top-10 list of North Korean defector assassination targets. Kang answers my questions in a soft voice and maintains a look of calm bemusement. But several NKSC staffers later tell me that his quiet demeanor masks a deep, lifelong anger directed at North Korea’s dictatorship, which held him and his entire family in a prison camp for 10 years of his childhood. (“Compared to some defectors I’ve met, he’s a little more pissed off,” one staffer confides.)

Kang Chol-hwan founded the dissident group NKSC, focused on injecting foreign media into North Korea. Here he holds a popular video player known in the country as a notel

It doesn’t take a decade in a gulag to see that North Korea needs a revolution. Since the Korean Peninsula split at the end of World War II, seven decades of disastrous financial decisions, isolationist economics, and sociopathic military threats against the rest of the world have turned the country into what Georgetown Asian studies professor and former National Security Council adviser Victor Cha calls simply “the worst place on earth.” Its recent history is a litany of disaster: Despite having a stronger economy and better infrastructure than South Korea in 1945, its GDP is now a fortieth the size of its southern neighbor. Only 16 percent of households have adequate access to food, according to a 2012 study by the World Food Program, stunting growth in 28 percent of the population. In some areas of the country, up to 40 percent of children under 5 are affected. The effects are mental as well as physical. A 2008 study by the National Intelligence Council found that a quarter of North Korean military conscripts are disqualified for cognitive disabilities.

The totalitarian government inherited by its 32-year-old leader, Kim Jong-un, punishes any real political resistance with death. And the regime’s most powerful tool for control remains its grip on North Korean minds. The state propaganda system indoctrinates its 25 million citizens from birth, insisting that the Kim family is infallible and that the country enjoys a superior standard of living. In a ranking of 197 countries’ press freedom by research group Freedom House, North Korea places last. It sees any attempt to introduce competing ideas, even the possession of a radio capable of accessing foreign frequencies, as a threat to its power; these infractions are punishable by exile to one of its prison camps, which hold as many as 200,000 people, according to Amnesty International. “The Kim regime needs its ideology,” Cha says. Without it, he argues, North Korea would face the same threats as every dictatorship, such as an internal coup or a popular revolt. “If they get to the point where all they can do is point guns at people, they’ll know their system has failed.”

A growing movement of North Korean defector activist groups, including Kang’s NKSC and others, like North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity and Fighters for a Free North Korea, views that reliance on ideological control as a weakness: Outside data is now penetrating North Korea’s borders more than ever before. One group has stashed USB drives in Chinese cargo trucks. Another has passed them over from tourist boats that meet with fishermen mid-river. An NKSC operative showed me a video in which he crawls under a border fence, walks into the Tumen River, and throws two tires to the opposite bank. Each one was filled with South Korean Choco Pies, Chinese cigarettes, and USB sticks loaded with movies like Snowpiercer, The Lives of Others, and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.

Even The Interview—the Kim Jong-un assassination comedy that the North Korean government tried to keep from being released by using threats, intimidation, and (according to the FBI) a devastating hacking operation against Sony Pictures—has made its way into the country. Chinese traders’ trucks carried 20 copies of the film across the border the day after Christmas, just two days after its online release. “What I do is what Kim Jong-un fears most,” says Jung, the smuggler, who shows me videos and pictures of his missions while seated in the lobby of a hospital in Bucheon, South Korea. Jung, wearing a military-style cap and pajamas, is taking a break from rehabilitation therapy for knee injuries he sustained while being tortured in a North Korean prison 15 years ago. “For every USB drive I send across, there are perhaps 100 North Koreans who begin to question why they live this way. Why they’ve been put in a jar.”

Each activist group has its own tactics: Fighters for a Free North Korea loads up 35-foot balloons that float into the country and rain down pamphlets, US dollar bills, and USB drives full of political materials. North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity smuggles in USBs filled with short documentaries about the outside world created by the group’s founder, a former North Korean computer scientist who used to help the government confiscate illicit media.

Kang’s NKSC, with its pop cultural offerings, capitalizes on North Korea’s flowering black markets. The group’s smugglers inside the country are motivated by profit as much as politics: A USB stick loaded with contraband films sells for more than a month’s food budget for most middle-class North Korean families. A pack of hundreds represents a small fortune. “In North Korea a USB drive is like gold,” one NKSC smuggler tells me.

For Kang, that makes each of those coveted flash drives a self-propelled weapon in a free-market information insurgency. “Right now, perhaps 30 percent of the population in North Korea knows about the outside world,” Kang says. “If you reach 50 percent, that’s enough people to start making demands, to start making changes.”

And if that enlightened audience reaches 80 percent? Or 90 percent? Kang leans forward. “Then there’s no way the North Korean government, in its current form, could continue to exist.”

A rare photo of a North Korean smuggler, carrying a bag of illegal USB drives on the Chinese side of the Tumen River as he prepares to cross back to his homeland. Activist Jung Kwang-il took the photo in May 2013

KANG CHOL-HWAN was 9 years old when his grandfather, a high-level government official and ethnic Korean immigrant from Japan, suddenly disappeared. It was the summer of 1977, and within a few weeks, soldiers came for the rest of his family, summarily stating that Kang’s grandfather had been convicted of “high treason” but giving no details. The entire three-generation family would immediately be sent to a reeduca­tion camp. The government confiscated the family’s house and nearly all its possessions, though the soldiers took pity on the tearful Kang and allowed him to carry out an aquarium of his favorite tropical fish.

Soon after the family’s arrival at the Yodok concentration camp in the country’s northeastern mountains, the fish floated dead in their tank. The family would spend the next decade in one of Kim Il-sung’s most notorious gulags.

Kang’s daily life alternated between school—rote memorization of communist propaganda—and slave labor in the camp’s cornfields, lumberyards, and gold mines. For a time, Kang’s work detail included burying the corpses of prisoners who died daily from starvation or perished in mine cave-ins and dynamite accidents.

Children who disobeyed even slightly were beaten. Adult transgressors spent days, or even months, in the sweatbox, a tiny windowless shack in which victims could only crouch on hands and knees. Sometimes prisoners, including Kang, would be required to witness executions. Once he and other inmates were ordered to stone the hanging corpses of would-be escapees. “The skin on the victims’ faces eventually came undone and nothing remained of their clothing but a few bloody shreds,” Kang would later describe it. “I had the strange feeling of being swallowed up in a world where the earth and sky had changed places.”

As the years passed, Kang became a resourceful survivor. He learned to eat wild salamanders in a single swallow and catch rats with a lasso he designed out of wire. Their meat sustained him and several family members on the verge of starvation through winters at subzero temperatures.

When Kang was 18, the guards announced one day without preamble that his family would be released as a demonstration of leader Kim Il-sung’s generosity. Except Kang’s grandfather—he had been assigned to a different camp, his treason still unexplained. Kang never saw him again.

In his postprison life as a deliveryman in the western county of Pyungsung, Kang harbored few illusions about the corruption of the North Korean regime. But it wasn’t until around three years later that he accessed the information that crystallized his contempt. It came from a pirate radio.

A friend gave Kang two radio receivers. Kang paid a bribe to avoid registering one with police, and he learned how to disassemble its case and remove the filament that hardwired it to official regime frequencies. He and his closest confidants would huddle under a blanket—to muffle the sound from eavesdroppers—and listen to Voice of America, Christian stations, and the South’s Korean Broadcasting System. “At first I didn’t believe it,” he says. “Then I started to believe but felt guilty for listening. Eventually, I couldn’t stop.”

Under their blanket, they relearned all of North Korea’s history, including the fact that the North, not the South, had started the Korean War. Beginning in 1989, they followed the breakdown of Soviet Eastern Europe and the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, a close friend of Kim Il-sung. They heard the music of Simon and Garfunkel and Michael Jackson, even learning the lyrics and softly singing along. “Listening to the radio gave us the words we needed to express our dissatisfaction,” Kang would later write. “Every program, each new discovery, helped us tear a little freer from the enveloping web of deception.”

Soon a contact in the local government warned him: One of his companions had told the police about Kang’s secret radio sessions. He was under surveillance and faced potential arrest and reassignment to a labor camp. Posing as a businessman, he bribed border guards on the Yalu River and escaped to Dalian, China, and finally to Seoul.

After his escape Kang wrote a memoir, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, originally published in French in 2000 and a year later translated into English. It was a revelation: the most detailed account yet of life in North Korea’s gulags. Kang was asked to speak around the world, touring Ivy League schools and European conferences. President George W. Bush invited him to visit the White House, where they discussed his homeland’s growing human rights crisis. “It was always just a statistic—hundreds of thousands of people in labor camps,” says Georgetown’s Cha, who advised Bush on North Korea. “But Kang’s book put a name and a face and a story to these abuses.”

Back in South Korea, Kang’s story had no such impact. President Kim Dae-jung had won a Nobel Prize for the South’s so-called Sunshine Policy of compromise with the North to reestablish diplomatic ties. Kang’s story was seen as unfashionably antagonistic to the Kim regime and largely ignored.

Watching an illegal copy of Titanic as a girl in North Korea made defector activist Yeonmi Park ask questions for the first time about freedom and the outside world

By 2005, Kang had given up hope that South Korea or the rest of the world would act against the North Korean government. Change, he decided, would have to come from within, through the same life-altering education he had received from his illegal radio. He flipped his strategy: Instead of working to tell the world about the horrors of North Korea, he would work to tell North Koreans about the world.

That year, a Christian radio station donated 5,000 portable windup radios to Kang’s newly formed organization. Through defector contacts in China, he smuggled them into houses along North Korea’s Tumen River border. “Guards come to these houses to rest and buy cigarettes,” Kang explains. “We would give them these little radios too. So all of these bored kids, during their patrols, could listen to foreign radio broadcasts at night.”

With funding from private donors and governments it declines to name, NKSC has since grown to 15 paid staffers, including independent operators along the Chinese border, each with their own contacts in North Korea. Kang hopes to soon expand smuggling operations to 10,000 USB drives a year.

He’s also looking at ways the American tech community could advance NKSC’s mission. The group is working with the Wiki­media Foundation to put a North Korean–dialect version of Wikipedia on every flash drive it smuggles over. And in conjunction with the Human Rights Foundation, it’s been talking to Silicon Valley types about building new tools—everything from a small concealable satellite dish to steganographic videogames that hide illegal data. (The activists have considered delivering USBs with miniature drones, but that option remains impractically expensive.)

But as his group gains momentum, Kang faces a personal dilemma: Several of his family members remain inside North Korea, including his younger sister, Mi-ho. Despite canvassing his contacts there and filing a special request through the United Nations for information about Mi-ho’s whereabouts, Kang hasn’t been able to find her. She may even have been reimprisoned, says Choi Yoon-cheol, NKSC’s second-most-senior staffer. “Mr. Kang knows that the more active he is, the closer he gets to his vision, the more his family will suffer,” Choi says. “It must be incredibly difficult to know that what you’re doing can hurt the people you love.”

When I first ask Kang about his sister, he denies any connection between her safety and his work. Perhaps in an effort to protect her, he argues that the two are now estranged.

Besides, he coldly insists, his own family is no longer the issue. “This is a government that doesn’t deserve to survive,” he says. “If someone has to destroy it, I’ll gladly be the one.”

Jung works as a data smuggler, coordinating stealthy meetings with contacts along North Korea’s Chinese border. He still suffers from injuries inflicted during torture in one of the country’s prisons 15 years ago

YEONMI PARK’S FAMILY paid around 3,000 North Korean won for a pack of DVDs that contained a bootleg of Titanic. In the early 2000s, she remembers, that was the cost of several pounds of rice in her home city of Hyesan—a significant sacrifice in a starving country. But of all the tween girls who became obsessed with the star-crossed romance of Jack and Rose, Park was one of the very few who saw it as downright revolutionary. “In North Korea they had taught us that you die for the regime. In this movie it was like, whoa, he’s dying for a girl he loves,” she says. “I thought, how can anyone make this and not be killed?”

Titanic was hardly Park’s only foreign-­video experience. Her mother had sold DVDs; some of Park’s earliest memories are of waking to the grunts and shouts of her father watching American WWF wrestling. Park loved Cinderella, Snow White, and Pretty Woman. The family would put its tapes and discs in a plastic bag and bury it beneath a potted plant to hide it from the police.

But of all those illegal encounters with foreign culture, Titanic was somehow the film that made Park ask herself questions about freedom and the outside world. “It made me feel like something was off with our system,” she says in fluent English, which she perfected by watching the entire run of Friends dozens of times.

Park escaped from North Korea in 2007. Now a 21-year-old activist based in Seoul, she’s part of what’s known in Korea as the jangmadang sedae: the black-market generation. During a famine in the North in the mid-1990s, the Kim regime began to tolerate illegal trade because it was the only option to feed a starving population. Since then, black-market commerce has been nearly impossible to stamp out. And some of the hottest commodities—particularly for young people who don’t even remember a North Korea before that underground trade existed—have been foreign music and movies, along with the Chinese-made gadgets to play them.

A 2010 study by the US Broadcasting Board of Governors found that 74 percent of North Koreans have access to a TV and 46 percent can access a DVD player. Park says that nearly all of her friends in Hyesan had seen a foreign film or TV show. As a result, her generation is the first to have to square the Kim regime’s propaganda with a keyhole view of the outside world. A group called Liberty in North Korea, which works with young defector refugees, finds that many no longer believe in central tenets of North Korea’s political ideology, such as the country’s superior standard of living or the godlike powers of the Kim family. Even the regime is letting that second illusion slide, admitting that Kim Jong-un has health issues—hardly the norm for heavenly beings.

Thanks to the flourishing black market, the jangmadang generation’s technology has advanced well beyond radios and DVDs. Despite North Korea’s near-complete lack of Internet access, there are close to 3.5 million PCs in the country and 5 million tablets, according to North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity. But perhaps the most important piece of hardware in North Korea today is what’s known as a notel—a small, portable video player sold for $60 to $100 and capable of handling multiple formats. It has a screen, a rechargeable battery to deal with frequent blackouts, and crucially, USB and SD card ports. In a surprise move in December, the North Korean government legalized the devices, perhaps as part of a bid to modernize its propaganda machine, according to Seoul-based news outlet Daily NK. The result is millions of ready customers for the USB sticks smuggled across the Chinese border.

In one of North Korea’s bustling markets, a buyer might quietly ask for something “fun,” meaning foreign, or “from the village below,” referring to South Korea. The seller may lead him or her to a private place, often someone’s home, before turning over the goods. The foreign data is then consumed on a notel among small, discreet groups of mostly young people, friends who enter into an unspoken pact of breaking the law together so that no one can rat out anyone else.

The Kim regime has responded by cracking down. In late 2013 the government reportedly executed 80 people across seven cities in a single day, many for trafficking in illegal media. In February last year, the Worker’s Party of Korea held its largest-ever conference of propagandists. Kim Jong-un himself delivered an address calling for the party to “take the initiative in launching operations to make the imperialist moves for ideological and cultural infiltration end in smoke” and to set up “mosquito nets with two or three layers to prevent capitalist ideology, which the enemy is persistently attempting to spread, from infiltrating across our border.”

But stamping out illegal media in North Korea has become an intractable problem for the government, according to Sokeel Park, director of research and strategy for Liberty in North Korea. He compares it to the stubborn demand for illegal drugs in the US. “You could call it Kim Jong-un’s War on Information,” he says. “But just like a war on drugs—you can try to slow it down, increase the risks, increase the punishments, put more people in prison. The bribe costs will go up, but it’s still going to happen.”

NKSC founder Kang and his family spent 10 years in a North Korean gulag

BY HIS THIRD year working for Kim Jong-il’s thought police, Kim Heung-kwang says he could almost sense the presence of illegal data.

Going door-to-door with the task force assigned to search out digital contraband in citizens’ homes, he remembers finding forbidden DVDs and players hidden under beds and in books with pages cut away to create hidden compartments. On one occasion he caught a group of video watchers who had, in a panic, hidden together under a blanket in a closet. Early on he found that when he knocked on doors, the guilty watchers would hurriedly hide their DVDs. So he learned to turn off the power to the entire building before making his house calls, trapping discs in their players. “I felt they were watching rotten, capitalist material and ruining the juche mentality,” Kim says, referring to the North Korean communist ideology. The short, bespectacled man, sitting in his austere Seoul office, smiles wearily and crosses his legs with a professorial air. “I felt justified to send these criminals away.”

The DVD owners would cry and plead. They’d beg on their knees and pull on the sleeves of his uniform, claiming they had just found the offending media lying in the street. Sometimes he accepted bribes and turned a blind eye. (“You could feel the outside of the envelope between your fingers and tell whether it was a lot of money,” he remembers.) But most of the data criminals he caught, he reported. Many were sentenced to months or years in prison camps.

Kim had earned membership in the all-powerful Communist Party through years of work helping to create North Korea’s own computers, including the Paektusan minicomputer, named for the mountain where Kim Jong-il was said to have been born. As a computer science professor at Hamhung University, he had even taught students who would go on to work for North Korea’s cyberwarfare brigade, Unit 121—the group suspected of the Sony breach—in the basics of networking and operation systems.

After black markets began to spread, Kim was reassigned in 2000 to a military division that went door-to-door to search for contraband media. “I loved it,” he says. “I had the power to go into homes and take these materials and no one could even question me.”

One of the perks of Kim’s position, of course, was nearly infinite access to the media he confiscated. He began to watch the contraband films and TV shows and even loaned out his collection to friends, who rewarded him with gifts like alcohol and meat.

In 2002, Kim was given a PC, part of what he describes as a secret aid shipment from South Korea. Its hard drive had been wiped. But using forensic recovery software, Kim was able to reassemble its deleted contents. They included 400 files: films, TV shows, and, most important to his intellectual sensibilities, ebooks. “You can’t imagine how excited I was,” he says. “I had hit a gold mine.”

These were what finally transformed Kim’s thinking. He remembers reading a Dale Carnegie self-help book and Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. But most influential was a history book about Middle Eastern dictators, including the stories of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, all friends of the Kim regime. “Reading about the crimes happening in these countries, I began to realize that those crimes were happening in my country too,” Kim says. “That was the starting point of the logic shifting in my brain. I began to understand the nature of dictatorship.”

Kim’s epiphany came when he read an illegal ebook retrieved from a South Korean hard drive. “That was the starting point of the logic shifting in my brain,” he says. “I began to understand the nature of dictatorship.

Even then, Kim continued busting viewers of the same foreign media he now regularly watched. “I sent a lot of people away, but the karma soon came back to me,” he says.

In 2003 he was arrested and taken to a detention center; he’d been ratted out by one of the comrades with whom he’d shared his secret store. He says the police tortured him for a week, forcing him to write hundreds of pages of confession under hot lights and preventing him from sleeping by jabbing his forehead with a needle. When they found that he had only distributed materials to a few friends, he was given a “lenient” sentence: a year at a reeduca­tion farm 40 miles outside Hamhung. “I grew to literally hate the land itself,” he says. “I couldn’t understand why watching a few foreign films should cost me a year of my life.”

After the year of drudgery, Kim was released and managed to bribe a border guard to help him escape across the Tumen. He made his way from China to Seoul, where he set up North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity.

Kim’s strategy is much like Kang’s with NKSC, using Chinese traders and smuggler contacts. But Kim has only a handful of full-time staffers. Instead of asking his North Korean contacts to wade across the Tumen, he describes throwing a rock tied to the end of a rope across the river. Smugglers on the other side, he says, use it to pull across a plastic-­wrapped bucket of USB drives. (He’s also experimenting with a three-man water balloon slingshot that can catapult contraband hundreds of feet past guards.)

Unlike the pop cultural programming proffered by Kang’s group, the content on Kim’s drives includes mostly short educational documentaries created by and starring Kim himself. He explains to North Koreans what democracy is, for instance, or simply shows them what a bookstore or the Internet looks like. “When a North Korean watches an action movie with a chase scene in a grocery store, they want to slow it down to see what’s on the shelves,” he says. “I show them what they want to see—what I wanted to see when I was there.”

Kim has also developed what he calls stealth USB drives, designed to avoid detection. To any casual observer, the drive seems empty. But its contents reappear with a simple trigger, the details of which Kim asked that I not publicize. Not even the buyer would necessarily know that the USB contained illegal educational materials, he says. Instead, the files would simply materialize one day, a spontaneous gift Kim hopes will be as life-changing as the hard drive whose wondrous contents he once discovered.

Kim denies that his work today is repentance for past sins as a member of Kim Jong-il’s data gestapo. He describes the zealot of those years as almost a different person. But when I ask if he still feels guilt for the lives he wrecked, his polite academic’s smile finally cracks. He massages his temples with one hand.

Once, he says, he found a collection of foreign DVDs in the home of a single mother and her two middle-school-aged sons. He could tell by the teen-oriented content that they belonged to the kids. The mother insisted the DVDs were hers, sacrificing herself for her children. Kim says he was inclined to let her go, but a hard-line colleague insisted she be reported, condemning her to a prison camp.

“I wanted to forgive her,” Kim says. He pauses. “I still think about that family sometimes.”

USB drives filled with foreign content and ready to be taken across the border in a plastic bag, lying on the bank of the Tumen River.

ON A FRIDAY night in an NKSC conference room, a young North Korean defector who has asked me to call her Yae-un is watching a copy of the teen comedy Superbad. She would later explain to me that she “had never seen a movie on that scale of filthiness before,” and she doesn’t hide her reaction; she spends most of the 113-minute barrage of adolescent sexual angst and **** jokes covering her face with the backs of her hands, as if to cool off her burning cheeks.

The movie was supposed to be screened for one of the defector focus groups that NKSC assembles to learn how North Koreans react to different types of media, the better to smuggle in the materials with the most impact. But on this occasion, all the North Koreans but Yae-un are busy or have canceled at the last minute. So, like some kind of Clockwork Orange parody, the focus group has been reduced to one North Korean, watched by me, an NKSC staffer, and volunteers as she reacts to Jonah Hill and Michael Cera trying very hard to get laid.

When the movie finishes, Yae-un starts by listing the most astonishing elements from a North Korean perspective: the frank sex talk, constant genitalia references, underage drinking, cops crashing their car, teenage McLovin shooting a gun. All would be seen as indescribably alien, she says. “Even watching it now, I find it vulgar and shocking,” she says. “If I were still in North Korea, it would blow my mind.”

So maybe NKSC should skip this one, suggests Rocky Kim, the staffer who organized the screening. “Maybe a documentary would be better?” he asks.

Not at all. “I would vote to send it,” Yae-un says without hesitation. “It will blow their minds, but it’s not like they’ll actually explode. They’ll recover.”

Predicting North Koreans’ reactions to foreign media isn’t easy. The Interview, for all the furor it elicited from the Kim regime, got an equally negative reaction from North Koreans who saw it on the other side of the border. The smuggler Jung Kwang-il says contacts he spoke to in the country were offended by its low production values and mockery of North Korean culture. “They thought it was poorly made on purpose to mock North Korea, but I explained it was just a bad movie,” he says. “They prefer The Hunger Games.”

Other high-profile tactics by the North Korean free-information movement have backfired in their own ways: A balloon launch by Fighters for a Free North Korea in October prompted the North Korean military to fire antiaircraft machine guns over a border village. Some of its balloons, meanwhile, end up stuck in the mountains, blown out to sea, or even back in South Korea. The pamphlets they include, according to some activists, criticize the regime too directly and are dismissed by North Koreans as just another form of propaganda.

Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, the demilitarized zone separating the North and South has become the world’s starkest border between technological haves and have-nots.

NKSC is more cautious about its content. Ultimately the group decided that Superbad was too risqué for the North; so much for **** jokes defeating dictators.

But there’s a question that persisted throughout my conversations with the groups: How does North Korea get from an information revolution to an actual people-in-the-streets-and-toppled-statues revolution?

I pose that question to Kang Chol-hwan while we sit in his office one freezing, snowy afternoon, my last day in Korea. He admits there’s not a simple answer, but he offers a few scenarios he considers plausible: The government, for instance, could sense the disconnect between its propaganda and the people’s foreign-media education and launch its own reforms, the kind of gradual opening that took place in Russia and China. Or a disillusioned populace could begin defecting en masse, forcing a border control crisis. Or some spark, like the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, could coalesce disillusioned North Koreans into their own Arab Spring, a full-scale grassroots uprising.

But then Kang surprises me by admitting that all those scenarios are unlikely: The Kim regime is too blind and stubborn to initiate its own reforms, he says, and its totalitarian grip may be too tight for a bottom-up revolution. He puts his highest hopes instead in another scenario: that NKSC’s foreign heresy could penetrate the government and military’s middle ranks and even their elite, eroding the ideology of the Communist Party itself and fracturing Kim Jong-un’s power base from within.

A minute later, however, Kang suddenly flips back to his earlier optimism: He predicts that, thanks in part to his information strategy, North Korea’s dictatorship will end within a decade. “They’re already cracking,” he says. “In less than 10 years, I’ll be able to freely go in and out.”

That nakedly idealistic statement, beyond its tinge of wishful thinking, seems to reveal something new about how Kang sees his goal. In spite of all his childhood horrors, he wants to transform North Korea not simply into a nation that will let his countrymen go free, but one that will let him back in: He wants to go home again. And whether his smuggling tactics succeed or fail, he’ll continue to send his USB thumb drives into North Korea, like offerings to a mute idol, because it’s the best plan he’s got. “I have no direct power against the North Korean government,” he admits unprompted, his face blank.

Outside the window, it’s getting dark and the snow is still falling. A polar vortex has pushed Siberian air southward, bringing winter winds down the Korean Peninsula earlier than most years. And as cold as it is in Seoul, it’s far colder 150 miles north, in the prison camps where Kang spent his childhood and where his sister may still be today. “This is the best way—the only way for me—to open North Korea,” Kang finally says. “Every day until then is a delay to seeing my family again.”

[MIKA27]

Why Not Kick Back & Relax In This Stunning $108K Hippopotamus Chair?

It’s highly unlikely you'll ever be able to sit on a hippopotamus on account of them being one of the most aggressive and bad-tempered creatures on the planet.

But interior designer Maximo Riera has gone some way to addressing the problem by creating this frankly stunning statement piece of furniture titled ‘The Hippopotamus Chair’ - crafted to the same size as male hippo.

Coated in fine leather, it spans roughly 3 meters wide and stands 1.4 meters tall, “imposing” is also another way you could describe its dimensions.

Just 20 versions of the chair are set to be produced, once they have sold out, they won’t be repeated.

Due to their unique design, limited availability and high quality materials, each has a price tag of $108,000 - expensive unquestionably, but It's a lot safer than sitting on the real thing.

You can see more fun animal-inspired designs from the Spaniards 'Animal Chair Collection'

[MIKA27]

BONDIC | LIQUID PLASTIC WELDER

Meet the world´s first liquid plaster welder - Bondic. Most traditional glues are messy, get your fingers stuck together, and more than often can´t fix the problem. Bondic is a liquid plastic that only hardens when you need it to, it can be applied to surfaces including plastic, wood, metal, and fabric, then, when you´re ready, simply dry it with the included UV LED Light in 4 seconds and its done! Oh and the Bondic liquid in the tube won´t dry if you forget to recap it.

[MIKA27]

Microsoft's Folding Keyboard For iOS And Android Is A Razor-Thin Beauty

Imagine a keyboard that you can carry around like a wallet — almost as thin as paper, just a few millimetres — and that works with any smartphone or tablet, be it Android, iOS or Windows Phone. This is exactly what Microsoft’s new fold-able keyboard is, a little beauty for those who really miss physical keyboards on the go.

Microsoft introduced today this keyboard along with the new affordable Lumia 640 and 640 XL. It’s actually a new version of its larger, non-foldable universal keyboard, but this one feels like magic when you use it. Really. I tried it today at Mobile World Congress and it folds right in the middle. Very convenient to carry around inside a bag or even in your jacket pocket. Think of it as a foldable Surface Pro 3 Touch cover, but thinner and better designed. A clever magnet keeps both halves from opening up when you don’t want them too. It’s another great example of New Microsoft making awesome things that work with the devices you already use.

The keys feel really comfortable, with exactly the right amount of travel. And you have enough space for both hands, almost like in a normal laptop. It can be connected to your device via Bluetooth (no word on battery life yet) or with a microUSB cable. Microsoft hasn’t confirmed pricing yet, but if this ends up being less than $US50 or just above that, I’ll buy one, maybe even two. If you’re a heavy typer, it’s definitely worth checking out when it hits shelves.

[MIKA27]

This Real-Life 'Mr. Fusion' Can Turn Leftovers Into Energy

Well, it’s 2015, and right on cue, humanity has apparently invented its very own Mr. Fusion. The s0-called “Biobattery”, designed by German scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Energy and Safety Technology, will eat everything from human waste to coffee grounds and spit out electricity.

A press release from Fraunhofer explains the rationale behind the new invention:

Biogas plants are an important element for decentralised energy supply. They produce electricity from renewable resources and can compensate for highly fluctuating wind and solar energy…However, the plants have several disadvantages too: they only process a limited range of organic substances and are in competition with the cultivation of food plants…with the biobattery’s modular concept a much larger range of biomass can be utilized for energy recovery than previously.

Unlike earlier biogas reactors — which typically process only a single type of organic waste — the Biobattery is designed for versatility, and will happily eat everything from sewage sludge to lawn clippings to leftovers. It can covert this array of waste products into electricity, heat, and high quality fuels including oil and gasoline, developers claim.

While we may not use this particular invention to traverse the space-time continuum anytime soon, a machine that turns week-old pizza into a little extra laptop juice still sounds pretty rad to me

[MIKA27]

SanDisk Has The First Flash Drive With A Reversible USB Type-C Connector

Remember those rumours about a 12-inch MacBook that ditched a MagSafe connector and traditional USB ports for a single USB Type-C port? If true, SanDisk’s new Dual USB Drive will be the first flash drive that’s able to connect to that redesigned hardware without an ugly adaptor.

But given it will be a few years before USB Type-C is common on all computers and mobile devices, SanDisk’s new 32GB Dual USB Drive still comes with a standard-sized USB port on one end. When using the other, though, you’ll never again have to make a 50/50 guess as to which is the right side up because like with Apple’s Lightning connector, USB Type-C is reversible — hooray!

[MIKA27]

WE WILL NEVER SEE A SUPERCAR LIKE THE BUGATTI VEYRON AGAIN

HAUL OUT THE shovels, ready a casket, and strike up the 240-mph band: The Bugatti Veyron is dead.

On Monday, Bugatti announced the sale of the 450th and final example of the 1,200-horsepower, 16-cylinder Veyron, a Grand Sport Vitesse “La Finale” edition, ending the car’s 10-year run as the pinnacle of automotive excess. The Veyron was designed without compromise, without regard to cost, and without purpose beyond being the benchmark for superlatives. We will never again see anything like it.

Bugatti president Wolfgang Dürheimer, in a statement, called the Veyron “unique in many respects” and “a masterpiece of modern automobile design.” For a machine that redefined everything we know about fast cars—the unprecedented performance, the stratospheric cost, the obsessive focus on the last detail—this is laughable understatement. The same release notes that the average Veyron price comes to $2.6 million once you’ve added up all the options. (As Car and Drivernotes, the destination charge alone—shipping via Air France—cost $100,000. Also, one buyer spent $72,500 on custom leather. He was undoubtedly not the only one.)

Given that Bugatti, which is owned by Volkswagen, is said to have lost money on every car, the car’s sticker is astonishing. Its price was thus mostly a reflection of the pantheon: At its launch, the Bugatti was the quickest, fastest, most expensive, and most evolved thing on wheels. As an astoundingly complex, turbocharged, all-wheel-drive, slightly distant, numbers-focused behemoth, it set the blueprint for every supercar that followed. And through horsepower and chassis updates, and a nearly endless series of special editions, it kept getting better, right until the end.

The Veyron began as a concept car, the product of VW Group chairman and 77-year-old company salt Ferdinand Piëch. Piëch, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, is a man of singular vision—his career has produced everything from Porsche’s Le Mans-dominating 917 racer to the modern Volkswagen Beetle, and he is famous for getting exactly what he wants. The Veyron show car drove people nuts, so Piëch decreed that it would be built, and that its performance would reach what were, at the time, unseen heights for a street-legal car: A top speed above 248 mph. An engine producing more than 1,000 horsepower. A 0-to-62-mph time of less than three seconds, and a chassis that didn’t abuse you like a racing car.

Piëch’s insistence on getting these relatively arbitrary metrics from a predetermined shape forced the Veyron’s construction team to cram five pounds of engineering into a nonnegotiable three-pound bag. Challenges like keeping the 4,500-pound car on the ground and holding its quad-turbo, W16 engine-powered, all-wheel-drive powertrain in one piece (the production car holds a remarkable 12 radiators) required far more work than would have been put into an ordinary car.

The final and 450th Veyron, dubbed “La Finale,” has been sold

Michelin pulled its collective hair out developing a set of street-capable, Veyron-specific tires that could withstand the load of 250 mph; they cost $25,000 a set. Because the show car’s shape wasn’t happy above 200 mph, a special top-speed mode was developed, automatically lowering the suspension and closing off chassis openings to limit drag. Bird strikes during triple-digit testing shattered the aluminum front grille and hurt various components, so the grille was remade in titanium and designed to hit animals, no damage, at 250 mph. The end result was so digitally managed—everything from torque distribution to active aerodynamics was controlled by computer—that its construction still teaches the industry lessons.

“Haters knocked it for being too heavy, not pretty enough, and too expensive,” says Jason Cammisa, senior editor for Road & Track and one of the few people who’s driven all four chassis variants of the supercar. “But the Veyron was engineered to be as light as scientifically possible. If it were any lighter, it literally would have broken itself in half under the engine’s twist.” Cammisa says the ongoing development and continual price increases were justified. “When Bugatti bumped the engine’s horsepower from 1,000 to 1,200, the car had to be completely reengineered, from the wheels to the roof. You could double the power of any other car and it’d be fine. It wasn’t too expensive because they sold every one they built. And the Veyron didn’t have to be pretty—it had to slice through the wind at 100 mph faster than a 747 takes off.”

Predictably, the Veyron was discontinued because it was old, and competitors have matched its numbers: Cottage carmakers like Hennessey and Shelby Super Cars have made a business of eclipsing the Bugatti’s top speed, and if you have $183,000, you can buy a version of the Porsche 911 that is a mere tenth of a second behind the first-gen Veyron to 60 mph. In recent years, hybrid hypercars like the Ferrari LaFerrari and McLaren P1 have used motors and batteries in addition to internal combustion to mirror the Bugatti’s abilities—everything save top speed, now acknowledged by manufacturers to be a useless metric—at a lower price, with fewer emissions.

But for a car birthed in numbers, the stats aren’t the prime takeaway. The Veyron stands as the apex of the old-school automobile, a testament to the power of technology used without conscience or compromise. The world no longer builds fast cars without some concession to the environment, and that’s a good thing. The Bugatti was one of humanity’s great selfish moments, a singular effort to use technology and sheer will to beat a ridiculous problem into submission, and it will likely be the greatest gasp of the non-hybrid, gas-powered car.

Rest in peace, you dinosaur. We’ll miss you.

[MIKA27]

Millions share new Chinese character

A new word is taking the internet by storm in China - but no one knows quite what it means.

The character "duang" is so new that it does not even exist in the Chinese dictionary. But it has already spread like wildfire online in China, appearing more than 8 million times on China's micro-blogging site Weibo, where it spawned a top-trending hashtag that drew 312,000 discussions among 15,000 users. On China's biggest online search engine Baidu, it has been looked up almost 600,000 times. It's been noticed in the West too, with Foreign Policy seeing it as a "break the internet" viral meme - like a certain Kim Kardashian image, or a certain multicoloured dress.

But what does it mean?

"Everyone's duang-ing and I still don't know what it means! Looks like it's back to school for me," said Weibo user Weileiweito.

Another user asked: "Have you duang-ed today? My mind is full of duang duang duang."

"To duang or not to duang, that is the question," wrote user BaiKut automan.

"Duang" seems to be an example of onomatopoeia, a word that phonetically imitates a sound. It all seems to have started with Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan, who in 2004 was featured in a shampoo commercial where he said famously defended his sleek, black hair using the rhythmical-sounding "duang". The word resurfaced again recently after Chan posted it on his Weibo page. Thousands of users then began to flood Chan's Weibo page with comments, coining the word in reference to his infamous shampoo appearance.

The word appears to have many different meanings, and there's no perfect translation, but you could use it as an adjective to give emphasis to the word that follows it. A kitten might be "duang cute", for example. Or you might be "very duang confused" by this blog.

For readers of Chinese characters, the Jackie Chan theme is also apparent from the quirky way in which the word is written: a combination of Chan's Mandarin names.

[NJP]

Not the same but like a Michael Jackson " Shamone"

[MIKA27]

The Dark Quest to Reanimate the Dead

Death, it seems is an immutable fact of life. We are tethered to it, destined for it, and indeed fearful of it. Throughout history mankind has sought to cheat this inevitable end. It seems we have a very strong urge to stave of death’s grip or at least in some cases to return from it. There have been many who have gone through great efforts to staunch the tide of decay and entropy; to drag the dead from the dark clutches of eternal oblivion and pull them back into the light. These attempts have run the gamut from freakish, ghoulish experiments like something out of a horror novel to more sober, scientific discussion on the matter. Here we will delve into the real life history of mankind’s desire to reanimate the dead.

Serious efforts to clinically confront and defy death date back to at least the 18th century. In the 1700s, a Catholic priest and professor of natural history at Pavia University by the name of Lazzaro Spallanzani became obsessed with the idea of reanimating dead tissue after noticing that some seemingly dead microscopic life seemed to spring back to life after adding water to them.

Spallazani became convinced that it was possible to resurrect dead organisms and he turned to the famous French skeptic and atheist Voltaire for guidance on this discovery. Voltaire believed Spallazani’s claims and when asked what his opinion was on where souls went after death he is said to have replied that it was up to Spallazani to find that out for himself. Taking this as encouragement to proceed, Spallazani moved on with his experiments. He graduated to more complex lifeforms, notably cutting the heads off of snails to see if they’d grow back. Although he never did find the secret to resurrecting the dead that he had so hoped to find, his research led him to being the first to discover chemicals in the body that aided in digestion, as well as to observe white blood cells.

Lazzaro Spallanzani

In 1794, the Royal Humane Society of London carried out a series of experiments in an effort to restore life to those deemed “apparently dead,” arguing that in some cases corpses were not really dead, but rather in some sort of state of suspended animation from which they could be revived and brought back to the land of the living. These efforts were in response to the widespread fear of premature burial at the time, which was rampant and seen as proof that the soul could hang some place between life and death and be revived. The Royal Humane Society sought to not only establish methods for reanimating such corpses, but also spread awareness and share their knowledge of such procedures all over the world. To be sure, their methods were crude. Most often the main techniques were to use electricity, massage, and the rather odd use of liquor forced down the throat, as well as tobacco smoke siphoned up the rectum of all places.

As dubious as these methods may seem to us now, news of such experiments reached far and wide, with the city of Charleston, South Carolina, particularly embracing the theory. The Medical Society of South Carolina purchased equipment from the Royal Humane Society in 1793 and went about trying to raise public awareness of the possibility of resurrecting such “apparently dead” cadavers. Their efforts were so convincing that eventually a law was passed on 19 August 1793, that required all owners of places where alcohol was sold, as spirits were a key ingredient to the process, to take in persons deemed “apparently dead” and attempt to use the Society’s techniques to bring them back to life. The law also mandated that all such establishments were to post a complete list of printed directions on how to do so.

As time went on and the 19th century dawned, a great deal of stock was put into electricity as a means to reawaken the dead. This was an age when electricity and its effects were still little understood, and it seemed like the influence of electrical currents was almost magical in nature. Many experiments were done to measure the effects of electric currents run through all manner of things such as plants, animals, and even human beings, just to see what would happen. It was even supposed that electricity had the power to create life from nothing, a theory that would gain traction in 1837 when physicist Andrew Crosse claimed he could form small organisms shaped like mites by simply running a current through an empty petri dish. It seems only natural then that the mysterious forces of electricity began to seen as a possible route to the reanimation of the dead.

In the 1800s, a physicist by the name of Giovanni Aldini carried out a series of twisted experiments involving the use of electricity for the purpose of reanimating dead animals. The son of famous scientist and electricity pioneer Luigi Galvani, Aldini was an ardent believer in his father’s theories on the application of electricity to bringing the dead back to life. Aldini started out small, demonstrating how current could send dead frogs and other small animals into twitching spasms, but his experiments quickly began to devolve into more sadistic, morbid affairs. In one gruesome display, Aldini applied a Leyden jar which had been charged with a potent current to the decapitated head of an ox, which much to the horror of onlookers began to convulse and spasm, its tongue lolling about in its mouth as if alive. Although this may seem like a natural outcome to us, at the time it was seen as something magical on par with witchcraft, and it was thought that such movements were tantamount to the presence of life. It certainly seemed to be powerful evidence at the time that yes, indeed electricity could reanimate dead tissue.

Aldini soon graduated from animals to humans as his experiments escalated in morbidity. Through no doubt nefarious means, he was somehow able to procure a steady flow of freshly executed criminals for use in his experiments. One of the earliest such efforts was when Aldini performed a demented procedure on a freshly killed 30-year-old man. An incision was made in the nape of the deceased man’s neck and a jolt was provided with a battery powered prod. Aldidni wrote of the experiment:

The posterior half of the Atlas vertebra was then removed by forceps, when the spinal marrow was brought into view. A profuse flow of liquid blood gushed from the wound, inundating the floor. A considerable incision at the same time was made in the left hip through the great gutteal muscle so as to bring the sciatic nerve into sight, and a small cut was made in the heel; the pointed rod with one end connected to the battery was now placed in contact with the spinal marrow, while the other rod was placed in contact with the sciatic nerve. Every muscle of the body was immediately agitated with convulsive movements resembling violent shuddering from the cold…On moving the second rod from the hip to the heel, the knee being previously bent, the leg was thrown out with such force the assistants, who in vain attempted to prevent its extension.

Creepy to be sure, but at the time seen as a very promising result. Yet, Aldini was not satisfied yet and would go on to take his experiments to even loftier heights of depravity. So convinced was he that electricity was the key to restoring life after death that Aldini sought to prove that even a body was not necessary for his theory to work. He took the horror factor up a notch and started applying current to just the freshly decapitated heads of criminals by wetting their ears with brine solution and then stuffing electrified wires into their ears. This had the predictable effect of causing the disembodied heads to grimace, convulse and twitch wildly. Aldinin was particularly fascinated by the movements of the eyelids during the procedures, once writing “The action of the eye-lids was exceedingly striking, though less sensible in the human head than in that of an ox.”

Such gruesome experiments gained widespread notoriety as Aldini brought his experiments on the road in order for all to see the wonders he was able to produce. In 1803 he infamously put on a public display in which he created lifelike movements upon applying current to a newly deceased man named George Forster, fresh from the gallows for killing his wife and child. The demonstration was done on a stage in front of an audience of shocked, gasping onlookers and Aldini finally got the recognition he was after when the Royal College of Surgeons took notice and ended up awarding him their prestigious Copley Medal for his work. In addition to trying to bring back the dead, Aldini also claimed that he could use electricity to resuscitate nearly dead people such as those who have nearly drowned, and his work was some of the earliest evidence to pave the way for the use of electricity for resuscitation.

Alfred Hoche was a German psychiatrist.

Such recognition by the medical community seemed to cement the legacy of electricity as a means of cheating death, and it was still being pursued well into the 1900s. A professor by the name of Albert Hoche was strongly convinced that electricity could jolt the dead back to life, and conducted similar experiments to those of Aldini. Hoche was similarly able to procure the corpse of a freshly executed criminal for the purpose of his demented experiment. The criminal had been decapitated and wasting no time Hoche proceeded to run a strong electrical current through the exposed spinal cord. Although again what happened next is perhaps no surprise to us, at the time it was mind boggling, and observers were bewildered by how the body convulsed spastically for a good 10 minutes before going still. This was still seen as miraculous proof of life after death, but Hoche was stumped as to how he could extend the effects and why the body had ultimately ceased is jerky dance. In the end, he wrongly theorized that the cooling of the body and loss of blood was to blame for the loss of movement, but he was never able to overcome this obstacle.

Starting from the 1930s, creepy reanimation experiments began to pop up mostly using dogs as subjects. One rather infamous figure in the field of trying to resurrect dogs was the American biologist Dr. Robert E. Cornish of the University of California at Berkeley, where he had received his doctorate and carried out his research in the 1930s. Before his field of interest took a turn for the macabre, Cornish had already accrued a reputation for being a bit of an odd one, designing weird inventions such as underwater reading glasses, but it was when he started his reanimation experiments that he really earned the title of mad scientist.

Cornish became obsessed with the idea of life after death and, after several false starts trying a variety of bizarre techniques, he truly believed that he had figured out a way to do it. The theory was that a dead subject could be restored back to life if the body was swung up and down rapidly on a seesaw-like contraption to simulate blood circulation while at the same time being fed oxygen through a tube and injected with a cocktail of adrenaline, liver extract, gum arabic, blood, and anticoagulants. Cornish was so convinced that the technique would work that he immediately began testing the theory on animals, namely dogs. Cornish acquired fox terriers for the purpose of his ghoulish experiments, all of which he named Lazarus, after the biblical figure who had risen from the dead. Cornish would asphyxiate the animals with nitrogen gas, after which he would wait 10 full minutes after death before starting the revival process. Lazarus I, II, and III proved to be failures, staying as dead as they had been before the process, but Cornish had more luck with Lazarus IV and V.

Seesaw device to simulate circulation.

Lazarus IV was claimed to have woken up with a “whine and a feeble bark” 5 minutes after its heart had stopped. Although the dog had gone blind and sustained severe brain damage, Cornish reported that after several days Lazarus IV was able to hobble around, sit up on its own, bark, and even eat. Encouraged by such promising results, Cornish moved onto Lazarus V, whom he considered an even bigger success than Lazarus IV. It was reported that Lazarus V was brought back to life a full 30 minutes after it had stopped breathing, and even so exhibited more of a range of movement and cognizance than Lazarus IV had. Both of these shambling zombie dogs went on to live for months, and it was said that other dogs displayed a marked fear of them.

Cornish was extremely excited and emboldened by his successful results and went to the scientific community with his findings, but they were less enthused. His experiments became very controversial and derided as nothing more than twisted, Frankenstein-esque grotesqueries. The public found the idea of killing and zombifying cute little dogs to be repellant, and the outcry over Cornish’s experiments prompted the University of California to evict him from the campus, after which he continued his work on his own from a garden shed, apparently upsetting the neighborhood with the odious fumes he produced. The mad scientist continued to perfect his techniques, going through who knows how many dogs until finally in 1947 he had an opportunity to finally experiment on a human being.

Robert E. Cornish became interested in the idea that he could restore life to the dead in 1932.

Cornish was contacted by the convicted child murderer Thomas McMonigle, who had heard much of the experiments and was willing to offer his cadaver for experimentation upon his execution at San Quentin Penitentiary. Cornish was ecstatic to finally have the opportunity to try out his outlandish methods on an actual human corpse, and went about working out the best way to do so. He believed that a technique using a homemade heart-lung machine and 60,000 shoelace eyes would do the trick if he could have access to the corpse quickly enough. Although he made his preparations and manufactured the machine he had planned to use, alas Cornish’s grand plan would be thwarted by several obstacles. Besides the fervent opposition he met from the warden of the prison at the time, Clifton Duffy, there was also the problem that McMonigle was to be executed by gas chamber, which required around an hour after death to air out all of the poisonous gas before the body could be removed safely, which was far too long for Cornish, who needed immediate access to the body for his plan to have any chance of working. There was additionally the moral dilemma of what to do with the criminal if the whole bizarre experiment actually worked; after all if the criminal was put to death and then revived, would that mean he had already served his sentence and was to be freed as a walking dead man? In the end, Cornish never got his chance to bring a person back from the dead. He would eventually give up on his experiments and move on to the rather baffling occupation of making and selling toothpaste until his death in 1963.

The 1940s and 50s were not a good time to be a dog in the Soviet Union either. The Soviets were already engaged in a wide variety of experiments to revive severed limbs and removed organs, so it seems like a natural step that they would move on to full reanimation of the dead, and indeed some of the creepiest such efforts come from the Soviet Union. Perhaps the most infamous and indeed gag inducing such experiments were carried out by Soviet scientist Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, Voronezh, U.S.S.R. The scientist became heavily involved in the reanimation of dead animals, mostly dogs, through the use of various arcane, scary looking machinery. In his most famous experiment, the decapitated head of a dog was hooked up to a sinister looking heart-lung machine that was called the “autojector,” after which the head apparently regained consciousness, moved its mouth, and blinked its eyes. In an effort to prove that the animal was indeed awake and cognizant, Bryukhonenko proceeded to torment the dog, rapping it on the head and even rubbing the inside of its nostril with acid, which the dog head then began to try and lick off. The dog reportedly remained awake and alive for quite some time, even eating and drinking things that were offered to it, which proceeded to move through the mouth and leak out of the severed esophagus. The machine was used to reanimate several dogs, as well as a wide variety of organs and severed limbs, although it is unclear how exactly it all worked. All we have are various archived videos of the experiments, and there have been those who suggest that the Soviets faked the videos.

The autojector

Not to be outdone by his colleague in sheer depravity and cruelty, another Soviet scientist by the name of Vladimir Demikhov conducted a macabre experiment to create what can only really be truly described as a two headed zombie dog. Demikhov was convinced that the key to reviving the dead was to graft the dead to the organs of the living. To prove his theory, he took a puppy and chopped it in half just below the forearms, after which he attached the half-body to the neck of a living fully grown dog.

Unbelievably, the dead portion of the dog came back to life looking around and lolling its tongue about in its mouth, like some ghastly moving tumor upon its host. Encouraged by this success, Demikhov would go on to create 20 such abominations, which sometimes lived for up to a month before tissue rejection caused them to die.

In the ensuing years, the United States would get in on experiments to reanimate the dead as well. One such series of experiments was carried out in 1967 at the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, in which dogs were brought back from death using a system of artificial circulation. These dogs were reported as being revived up to 19 min 30 sec. after death. The subjects of these experiments apparently fully recovered and led normal lives for years after, showing no physical abnormalities or differences in behavior from normal dogs, and even bearing litters of puppies. Another experiment was funded by the U.S. government in 1970, when scientist Robert White chopped off the head of a monkey and successfully brought it back to life by grafting it onto the decapitated body of another monkey. The resuscitated money lived for a full day. White maintained that the monkey could see, hear, taste, and smell due to the fact that the nerves of the brain and head were fully intact. White would go on to seek two human subjects to try the experiment on, and even found one in the form of a partially handicapped man named Craig Vetovitz, but after he was unable to find a second volunteer his work was discontinued.

Starting in the 1950s, a new form of resurrecting the dead made its appearance; the new field of cryobiology, or using extremely low temperatures to freeze subjects, after which they are brought back to life. One of the pioneers of this field was a scientist by the name of James Lovelock, who would make one of the first attempts to use cryobiology in a series of experiments carried out at Britain’s Mill Hill National Institute of Medical Research along with colleague Dr. Audrey Smith in the 1950s. In the experiments, hamsters were frozen by immersing them in a minus 5 degrees celsius bath for 60 to 90 minutes, essentially freezing them solid and making them for all intents and purposes clinically dead. After checking to see that the animals were completely frozen, often by actually cutting into them with a knife, the heart was warmed by the application of a warm spoon as the body was gradually warmed as well. Such efforts were successful, and later the use of warm spoons to coax the heart back to life, which sometimes burned the animals, would be replaced by the more humane use of radio frequency transmitters to create microwaves.

Cryobiology is the branch of biology that studies the effects of low temperatures on living things within Earth’s cryosphere or in science.

This groundbreaking procedure would go on to become almost commonplace by the 1960s, and it served the purpose of demonstrating that organisms could be brought to temperatures below freezing and be successfully revived. It would go on to become the basis of medical technology that is used to this day for the storage of organs destined to be used for transplants, low temperature surgery, and some types of experimental cardiac resuscitation techniques, and would additionally lead to the discovery of the cryopreservative properties of glycerol, which lowers the freezing point of water and is used for such purposes to this day. It would also go on to form the basis of the field of cryonics, which entails freezing larger animals such as humans in vats for future revival. Another, somewhat more ghastly experiment involving cryobiology was performed by researcher Isamu Suda at Japan’s Kobe University in the 1960s. Suda froze the brains of cats in glycerol mixtures and then reported that brainwave activity was detected after warming them up as long as two and a half years later.

Although a more rigid sense of ethics has taken hold in recent years, essentially putting the kibosh on many such animal experiments, there has been at least one notable case of such dramatic experiments as recently as 2002 at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, headed by a Dr. Patrick Kochanek. In the somewhat unsettling experiments, dogs were completely drained of blood and their veins then filled with an ice cold saline solution which put the subjects in a state of extreme hypothermia and made them clinically dead, with no signs of heartbeat, breathing, or brain activity, while preserving the tissues in a state of frigid suspended animation. The animals were then successfully brought back to life up to 3 hours after death by gradually returning blood to the bodies while providing pure oxygen and stimulating the heart with electric shocks. The experiments had mixed results, with some of the dogs being none the worse for wear from their ordeal while others displayed severe brain damage and/or “behavioral problems.” It is unclear if one of these might be shambling around attacking the living. The Safar Center has continued this research with the stated aim of eventually using their techniques to buy time for critically wounded people by putting them into a state of suspended animation until they can be properly treated. To allay fears and public outcry that the experiments are inhumane and unethical, the Safar Center has claimed that all of its experiments use proper pain medication and anesthetics, as well as pointing out that they are overseen by the University of Pittsburgh’s veterinary staff. The center ultimately plans to begin human trials.

Although there is no known successful experiment on a human being brought back from life after such dramatic cooling, it is in theory possible and there is one fairly recent case that shows it can indeed work. In 1999, a Swedish medical student by the name of Anna Bagenholm was skiing when she lost control and crashed head first into a thin patch on ice on a stream. She slipped into the icy water and struggled for 40 minutes under the ice as her friends tried to help free her until her heart finally stopped. It took an additional 40 minutes for a rescue team to arrive, by which time Bagenholm was clinically dead, with no sign of respiration or heartbeat. Nevertheless, she was rushed to a hospital and given CPR as the team desperately struggled to do what they could.

Later, 3 and a half hours after Bagenholm’s heart had stopped, doctors were able to detect a heartbeat once again and proceeded to successfully revive her. Anna Bagenholm would go on to lead a perfectly normal life, with nearly no discernible negative physical effects from her harrowing ordeal. It certainly seems that at least in theory, the idea of bringing back a human from the dead is plausible in certain situations.

The thought of being able to bring the dead back to life is a seductive one. It is perhaps no wonder why humankind has gone to such great lengths to pursue such things; after all who wouldn’t want to buy a little more time and have one more chance at living again after shuffling out of this mortal coil? The thought of living once again is almost intoxicating, but is it really physically possible to truly beat death?

One of the main limitations to returning from the dead lies in our very cells. All of our cells are covered with a thin membrane that essentially protects it from its surroundings and filters out molecules that are not necessary to its survival. When a cell approaches death, this membrane becomes thin and the cell will either be absorbed by surrounding specialized maintenance cells, it will basically eat itself, or the cell membrane will rupture, its content spectacularly spewed into the surrounding tissue. Once any of these three things happen, there is no going back and the cell’s death is final. When this final cellular death occurs, reanimation becomes impossible short of actual magic or a miracle, which would be the basis of a whole other article.

The key to any attempt to bring back the dead therefore lies in making sure that the body’s cells do none of those things and that the outer membrane remains intact. In some circumstances, our cells can retain their membranes for a remarkably long time after we are no longer living in any physically recognizable way such as exhibiting breathing, a heartbeat, or brain waves. True reanimation relies on reviving these surviving cells before they crash or are destroyed for good, but it is a difficult thing to do, especially since the type of cells that are most prone to oxygen deprivation and thus more likely to quickly disintegrate are brain cells. One of the only ways that has been found to plausibly stave off cellular death even after apparent physical death is a state of suspended animation caused by extremely low temperatures, but it is uncertain just how long after death the cells can be preserved in this way and that is one of the problems. The real hurdle to truly bringing back the dead to a state they enjoyed in life ultimately comes down to both time and making sure that the brain cells do not sustain the kind of damage that will basically make them something akin to a mindless zombie. If we can find a way do do that, then only then will we have truly mastered death, at least in some circumstances.

We have looked at some of the weird history of trying to cheat death, but what does the future of reanimation research hold? While it has undeniably been important and the basis of many advances in the medical field for the purposes of organ storage and resuscitation techniques, will there ever truly be a time when dying will become not our final end or an immutable fact of life, but rather just a minor inconvenience? Will we ever have the ability to truly block the inexorable coming of our demise and turn it from something that is an “inevitable end” to something that is merely “occasional”? If so, what ramifications would such an ability have on society as we know it? One thing that we can be sure of is that as long as the lure of life after death exists, there will be those who toil away in labs, or perhaps even in a garden shed, feverishly trying to find a way to do it.

[MIKA27]

Ford Mode Pro: Ford's Latest Concept Has Two Wheels

Ford announced a brand new concept vehicle at Mobile World Congress this week, but it will never do 0-100km/h, nor will it ever see a drop of fossil fuel. It’s a smart bicycle designed for the megacities of the future. Meet the Ford Mode:Pro.

The Mode:Pro is a sexy future-bike powered by a 9 Amp-hour battery and a 200 Watt motor. It’s attached to the bike in such a way that it’s designed to give you a boost when you pull away from lights or go up hills rather than power the thing full-time. That’s what your legs are for.

An iPhone 6 sits on the frame and tracks your heart rate, directions and GPS location via an app. That app will automatically fire up the electric motor if it notices your heart rate going up beyond a pre-set limit, or if it figures you might get a bit sweaty on your ride.

Right now, it’s a concept from Ford designed to show professional bike courier businesses what they can do if they had the right gear. Stuff like same-day or even same-hour delivery in big cities like LA or in China.

Ford envisages that it could go into production — most everything is stock off the shelf anyway — but it’s just a concept for now.

Either way, it’s gorgeous. Check out more below.

[MIKA27]

The Walking Dead season 5 will get a 90-minute finale

The Walking Dead will end its fifth season with a bang, with Entertainment Weekly reporting that the AMC show will wrap up with a special 90-minute finale.

The report goes on to mention an accompanying episode of live aftershow Talking Dead, which will apparently “bid farewell to fallen characters”.

It remains to be seen whether that’s a reference to those who have already departed or whether the finale will see some more key deaths. We wouldn’t bet against the latter…

With the season premiere having set a new ratings record for the series, The Walking Dead is more popular than ever, so it’s good to know fans will be rewarded with a bumper episode to round off the latest run.

The final episode will air in the US on 29 March 2015, with a UK date to be confirmed.

[MIKA27]

Harrison Ford confirmed for Blade Runner sequel directed by Denis Villeneuve

Big news concerning Alcon Entertainment’s Blade Runner sequel, with the studio officially confirming that Harrison Ford will return for a second outing as Rick Deckard.

It isn’t clear just how big Ford’s role will be, although Ridley Scott has previously been quoted as saying he will play a pivotal part in the film’s third act. Scott devised the story for the sequel alongside screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who has co-written the script with Michael Green.

The new film will begin shooting in summer 2016, with the official press release also revealing that Denis Villeneuve is in negotiations to fill the director’s chair.

“We are honored that Harrison is joining us on this journey with Denis Villeneuve, who is a singular talent, as we experienced personally on Prisoners,” reads a joint quote from Alcon co-founders and co-CEOs Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson.

“Hampton and Michael, with Ridley Scott, have crafted a uniquely potent and faithful sequel to one of the most universally celebrated films of all time, and we couldn’t be more thrilled with this amazing, creative team.”

No release date has been confirmed as yet, although it is expected that the film will arrive at some point in 2017.

[MIKA27]

Indoor Skydiving With iFly Downunder

For those who wish they could fly yet think that throwing oneself out of a perfectly good airplane is just crazy, indoor skydiving is all the thrill with none of the danger. We tried it out for ourselves, as well as taking a behind the scenes look at how the facility works.

So what is indoor skydiving and how does it work? At the most basic level, it’s a huge vertical wind tunnel, able to generate speeds up to 250 km/h. People have a terminal velocity around 200 km/h, so it’s fast enough to hold you up. Originally, indoor sky diving facilities were little more than big tubes suspended over aircraft engines and propellers, with the excess air blasting out the top. In comparison, the iFly system is powered by advanced Mitsubishi Electric inverter technology that actually re-uses the high speed air to improve efficiency. iFly even have a smaller version on a cruise ship.

Wrapped in two storey high sheets of curved glass, you can watch other indoor skydivers take a flight, or look on enviously as the instructors swoop around, making it look easy. The floor is made from a strong stainless steel wire mesh while the roof vents are protected by louvers. Everything you need is included, from a flight jumpsuits to ear and eye protection – though make sure you are wearing sensible closed in shoes.

I have actually gone skydiving before as well, so can make a direct comparison. Leaping out of a plane (albeit strapped to an instructor) is pretty scary – your stomach tries to exit your body and your heart goes into overdrive. By the time your brain finishes processing the fact that you are plummeting towards the earth and relaxes a little, the dive is almost over. For about 3 seconds you can imagine you are a bird as the wind whistles by before getting jerked out of it by your chute opening. While experienced skydivers have plenty of time for aerial shenanigans, for the novice it’s mostly about falling in a stable way.

Indoor skydiving on the other hand is a totally different experience. We took two 1 minute flights – each actually lasting longer than a normal skydive. There is no sensation of falling at all – you just step into a very windy room and lean over. The air immediately picks you up and supports every part of your body and we found you can relax almost immediately. It also helps that there is an instructor dancing around you, helping steady and guide your body. Using the training shown pre-flight, it’s actually fairly easy to control your position. Spread out and you rise, tuck in and you drift downwards. Cupping the air gently with your hands lets you turn in either direct, while a little legwork and you can move forward and back. Almost immediately you realise that you are flying, and more importantly, that you are in control. If you are a little wobbly at first, the instructor will unobtrusively help keep you on track. Once the flight is over, you head back to the door, grab hold and step through. It’s a surreal experience going from 200+ km/h winds to nothing and it leaves you wanting to get back in for another go.

If you pony up for the full package, at the end of your flight they will crank up the wind speed and take you for a wild ride right to the top of the wind tunnel and back. Surprisingly when dropping out of the air towards the mesh floor, you still don’t feel like you are falling. Even if you don’t fly yourself, it’s a great experience to go along and watch others do it. It’s not just for fun either – the military often use the facility for skydive training. Check out the iFly experience video below.

Not normally open to the public, iFly took us for a behind the scenes tour of the facility. The imposing iFly building is actually almost all there to support the central wind tunnel. As you can imagine, generating 250 km/h winds is not exactly easy. In fact the system uses four Mitsubishi FR-F700 variable speed inverters driving four 315 kW electric motors up above the wind tunnel. It also has a Q-Series Modular logic system that lets the operator of the tunnel vary the wind speed to suit different people and skill levels. Because the system re-circulates the air, a powerful air-conditioning system is used to keep it nice and cool. Check out the size of the power cables for just one of the fans below.

Now the important question — how much does it cost? Two 1 minute flights for a first timer will set you back $109, though this can be reduced a little if you go mid-week before 12pm. You can also get better value packages for more flights, or throw in an extra $10 and ride up the tunnel with your instructor. iFly current operates a facility in Penrith, Sydney and has a Gold Coast operation opening up later in the year.

While not exactly cheap, it’s still a whole lot more affordable than actual skydiving and we highly recommend you give it a try. It’s not affected by weather either, so you can do it any time. Adrenalin junkies might disagree, but I actually found it a much better experience than actual real world skydiving. Not only is it a lot less stressful, you can concentrate on actually flying and even on your first go you can perform manoeuvrers not normally possible for a rookie skydiver. It’s also a lot more convenient. The training is shorter, you don’t have to wait around for the wind and when you are done you can grab a coffee and watch your friends fly.

For more information or to book in a flight, check out iFly Downunder.